NOTE: I’m aware that my blog partner Doug already posted a copy of this video here yesterday, but I felt it was just too important not to revisit in light of information just revealed to me via The Right Scoop. (See comments below)

Now, are we to believe that the head of the IRS didn’t sanction this investigation, or even know it had occurred? That’s about as believable as the assertion that Barack Obama had nothing to do with the Benghazi stand-down orders, or that he, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Jay Carney didn’t repeatedly lie about the cause of the consulate attacks of 09/11/12.

Former IRS chief Doug Shulman told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Wednesday he never discussed IRS political targeting with the White House, despite 118 visits to the White House in the course of two years.

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This is despite the fact that 132 different members of Congress contacted Shulman over a two year period starting in 2010 that the IRS was targeting conservative groups.

During that time Douglas Shulman visited the White House 118 times.

In 2010 Douglas Shulman met over 30 times at the White House with Nancy-Ann Min DeParle director of the White House Office of Health Reform. Shulman also met with Austan Goolsbee, Peter Orszag and Ezekiel Emanual, Rahm’s brother, at the White House.

Shulman also met with President Obama on September 21, 2009, June 6, 2011, December 2, 2011 and in June 5, 2012.

And finally, let’s not overlook the role that certain Congressional Democrats played in encouraging the IRS to go after conservatives as far back as the Tea Party-dominated 2010 election cycle.

Starting in the fall of 2010, ten leading Democrats – Including, Max Baucus, Chuck Schumer, and Al Franken – wrote the IRS demanding that the agency crack down on conservative groups.

500 conservative and Christian groups were illegally targeted by the Obama IRS starting in 2010. For twenty-seven months the Obama IRS refused to approve any Tea Party applications for tax-exempt status while at the same time the Obama IRS approved dozens of progressive applications.

Now that the election is over, these same Democrats are feigning outrage that conservative groups were targeted by the IRS.

You and your readers should be aware that Douglas H. Shulman was appointed by Republican and conservative President George W. Bush and served a full term from 2008 through 2012, including the period when I.R.S. employees are said to have put added demands on conservative groups apply for tax exempt status.

Americans should be aware also that: The IRS-tea party controversy revolves around “501(c)(4) nonprofits, also known as “social welfare” groups. They can dabble in politics, but it can’t be their “primary activity.” In other words, they can’t be a political party, campaign committee, or a super-PAC in disguise. Yet as the IG report makes clear, the tax law and IRS regulations are foggy on how much politics is too much politics. Not only are activists, lawyers, and political operatives drawing their own conclusions here; even IRS staffers don’t know exactly where the line is drawn. The IRS rules on political nonprofits are like a Jackson Pollock painting: Five people can look at them and arrive at five different conclusions about what they’re seeing.”

Investigation of “social welfare” groups is required by law, in effect. “The regulations for 501(c)(4) nonprofits date back to 1959, but politically active nonprofits did not explode in popularity until recently…after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision—which ruled that corporations and individuals could pour unlimited amounts of money into outside spending groups—501(c)(4)s surged in popularity, and the number of applications for new ones climbed from 1,591 in 2010 to 3,398 in 2012.”

Intellectual integrity should be paramount on this issue as in all others. It is important to separate facts from fiction, and to determine how and why certain conduct took place. It is important to distinguish between what might be considered bureaucratic bungling from political motivation.

The IRS should be held accountable by all means, but to disregard the known complexity of the Internal Revenue Code described as “the biggest, most complicated document ever assembled,” to disregard the fact that the IRC, comprised of some 4 million words, is written by the U.S. Congress, to disregard the challenging demands on the IRS that is charged with designing regulations to effect the IRC, to disregard the constant changes in the Code by Congress (between 2001 and 2008, changes averaged one a day), to disregard the many Tea Party affiliates, often neophytes politically and organizationally, who invited IRS scrutiny by their own behavior–reported “tax-code shenanigans, infighting, and fiscal irresponsibility, money spent frivolously,” etc., is to be uninformed, biased, irresponsible and unfair.

As the saying goes, everyone has a right to his or her own opinion, but not his or her own facts.